If you’re looking for a free-spirited, nature-loving liberal arts school where you can march to the beat of your own drum, Bates College might be the place for you. Nestled on the banks of the Androscoggin River in Lewiston, Maine, Bates is a stone’s throw from the ocean and the mountains while offering the community of the state’s second-largest city. It boasts passion, intellectual curiosity, and individualism as a few of its guiding values, proclaiming that “aligning who you are with what you do is the heart of the Bates experience.” As a truly intimate Northeastern school, Bates is competitive to get into: last year’s admission rate was 13% for an incoming class of only 503 students.
That all sounds excellent, of course, but don’t go breaking out the celebratory lobster rolls just yet. Bates has been test-optional for a long time, but the average test scores of its admitted students who did report are quite high (ACT composite was 32-34; SAT Reading & Writing 700-740; and SAT Math was 690-760).
Beyond that, Bates doesn’t have a required supplement. If you’re scratching your head wondering “how will I set myself apart now?,” scratch thy weary scalp no longer. We want to repeat this again: Bates does not have an official supplement. But all of the students we work with who apply to Bates write an email that essentially tells admissions why they want to go to Bates. So we think you should too. It’s time to send a personalized email conveying your interest, and we’ll walk you through just how to do that here.
Preparing Your Email
Remember, you’re sending this message to the Bates Admissions team to communicate your genuine desire to go to their college. You’ll want this message to sound professional and respectful, but you’ll also want to make it personal, demonstrating in your email that you’d be a great addition to the Bobcat student body. You won’t have all the space of “why this college” essay, but you do want to make sure you’ve touched on all the highlights of a hypothetical “why Bates” prompt and naturally folded them into the body of your message.
Once you’ve got your email whipped into shape, you can send it to admission@bates.edu, although you should call the admissions office and make sure this is the right recipient for your correspondence.
The Blueprint of a “Demonstrating Interest” Email
Be human. Okay, sorry, that was dramatic, but we all recognize the robotic introductions of an automatically generated email or the suspiciously friendly openings of a scam artist convincing you to wire money to your grandmother, who passed on dial-up decades ago and never looked back. What we should have said is introduce yourself. Write a pleasant hello, give your name, and say that you are reaching out because there was no dedicated space on the Common App to express your interest in Bates.
Ground your academic future in your backstory. You want an admissions counselor to remember you, and to do that, they have to know who you are and what you want to achieve in college. State your desired major here (even if you think you’ll later change your mind), then tell the story of how you discovered your love of this topic or developed your interest in studying it further. If you’d like to study Comparative Literature, for example, you could talk about how you’d always like to read but didn’t realize how captivated you were by world literature and postmodernism until you started going through your grandfather’s library of post-war fiction and history books on a long summer visit — an encounter that would guide your elective classes the last two years of high school.
Research the school, and reference classes and professors specific to Bates. Don’t forget — Bates is an incredibly small school with just about 500 spots per class. To make the case that you should be one of its few students, you’ll want to show that you took the time to get to know Bates well, that you’d be a productive and positive member of its community, and that you will take advantage of opportunities at Bates that you can’t find anywhere else. In order to do this, you’ll want to mention 1-2 upper-level courses particular to Bates (you can take Psych 101 anywhere), and you’ll want to single out a professor whose career inspires you, someone you might like to get to know as a principle investigator, mentor, or department advisor. If you’re looking for a place to start, you might want to check out Bates’ unique academic opportunities, including the 4-4-1 calendar that lets students focus on a topic of their interest during “Short Term” or its broad Senior Thesis requirement. Our comp-lit fanatic might mention English 244, “Sentimentality in U.S. Literature,” to learn more about how the politics of feeling, and expressing feeling, craft national identity.
Finally, include campus life. Now that you’ve laid out your scholastic ambitions, you need to leave admissions with the impression that you’re well-rounded and personal. Not all of college happens in the classroom! Single out a student group or activity you’d like to get involved with, preferably one that you have some history with to demonstrate continuity.
You’ll want to wrap up your email at about 350 words, but that’s the toughest part of writing this email. There are plenty of things that drew you to Bates in the first place, and once you lay those out — and articulate the interests you want to pursue in Lewiston — you’ll be figuring out how to move all your stuff to Maine in no time.
Still have questions? Get in touch with us here today.